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Did The Late-Mid to Late-Game Uber Stacks Ever get Balanced / Nerfed??

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Europa Universalis III 46143 EU3 - After Action Reports (AAR)
Anthropoid

Anthropoid

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Had a LOT of fun with EU Heir to the Throne a few years back (geeze how time flies). My most memorable game was as Castille playing on fairly difficult settings if I recall. I managed to take control of all of Iberia, then focused on northern Italy then expanded along the interceding southern Franco coastline and into France, Austria, Bavaria. I played up to about 1600 or thereabouts if memory serves . . .

What finally did it for me was the crazy force sizes as the game progressed. Me and the AI opponents along my northern borders all had like 80K + stacks in virtually every border province.

Just bought CKII and notice they seem to have rebalanced force sizes downward a good deal and brought in the role of mercs a bit more realistically (at least for that game). So I'm wondering if reinstalling EUIII HTT along with some combination of patches/mods/dlc that fix these problems is now timely?
 
My best bet would be to wait for the latest patch when it comes out of beta and buy Divine Wind, to see what they come up with.
 
Alpha Zeke said:
It won't change. The only thing that really halts doomstacks is attrition, which the ai ignores anyway.
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You mean ignores and gets killed by it not that is not effected by attrition right?

I seem to remember seeing many an AI stack dwindle down machining across Swiss Alps.

I have seen some big stacks but nothing like 80k. In my current Milan>Italy game I am HRE and have 150k army but stacks generally stay under 30 or attrition will push WE over the top and boom revolt city.
 
Damn that sucks! For a game that is so clearly focused on trying to represent historical reality, it is unbelievable that such an egregious flaw is STILL a problem in the game and will not likely be fixed!

The late game doomstacks were really the main reason I quit playing EU3, and if there aren't any mods or anything that fix that fundamental flaw in game dynamics I can't say I'm keen to play the game.

Sure, if you start up a game as a weaker start you do get a good hundred to 150 years of relatively balanced force sizes, but the whole point of the game is supposed to be to play from the beginning to end and see what you can do in the long haul . . . Sadly though, in my experience the results of that long haul are completely out of whack with real history, as in: not even remotely possible to have happened.

Really sucks. Ah well, did have some good fun with it.

Capzero said:
You mean ignores and gets killed by it not that is not effected by attrition right?

I seem to remember seeing many an AI stack dwindle down machining across Swiss Alps.

I have seen some big stacks but nothing like 80k. In my current Milan>Italy game I am HRE and have 150k army but stacks generally stay under 30 or attrition will push WE over the top and boom revolt city.
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Well admittedly it has been a long time since I last played the game. Pretty sure the HD that has it installed on it with my last saves is kaput, though maybe not . . . might have to check that.

However, I do recall with certainty that: the reason I grew tired of my longest and best Castille game were the Uber stacks that me AND two or three AI rivals had arrayed along the northern coast of Castille going from Aquitaine over to about Venice or Albania. I probably had tons of buildings and infrastructure in all my border provinces so that attrition was low, which allowed for really large stacks and which were necessary because the AI had comparable large stacks.
 
Anthropoid said:
However, I do recall with certainty that: the reason I grew tired of my longest and best Castille game were the Uber stacks that me AND two or three AI rivals had arrayed along the northern coast of Castille going from Aquitaine over to about Venice or Albania.
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Yeah, but so what. If you war against these giant stacks (I've never seen them THAT big...), let them walk on your land, and let attrition do its thing. Then you can easily kill the armies. The thing is, the province support limit is affected by many things - technology and ownership is one thing, I believe ownership is x3. So while you are fine standing with 80K troops in your own territory, the equivalent territory belonging to your enemy is only one third. This also makes it a lot harder to be aggresive with huge stacks, though!

Another thing: I find the AI will try to mirror your forces. If you have no forces on your frontier, the AI tends to have a very limited amount of troops. If you max your armies on the border, so will the AI...
 
Capzero said:
I have seen some big stacks but nothing like 80k. In my current Milan>Italy game I am HRE and have 150k army but stacks generally stay under 30 or attrition will push WE over the top and boom revolt city.
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I've never had stacks higher than 30k in any of my games. Sometimes the AI does come with some 60k or 70k doomstack, but those are actually pretty easy to kill when you lead them inside your own territory and surround them with many smaller stacks.
 
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Yeah armies are still big.
 
According to the wiki, the Spanish army in the 30 years war had about 300.000 men, so an army of 450.000 isn't that oversized. The problem is more that manpower is incredibly cheap. Refilling your manpower pool should take much longer than it is now and the total size of the manpower pool should be much smaller. Especially the base, any country of a significant size can completely ignore the army line buildings.

An additional idea might be that fortresses take up manpower as well to refill.
 
Well anyway stacks bigger than 60k with 30k artilery, are quite useless, you just can bring reinforcements stacks to back them, when you start losing men. More than 30 units in each row are quite not usefull. And good thing is to remember that artilery don't get damage when it is in second row, which means you actualy need only 30 artilery for front units, plus supports stacks.
 
I wouldn't say 80k stacks are impossible as in my mughal game I have seen 50-60k stacks coming from my austrian ally so I know they will put them that big, but it is rather late in the game(1765) and I myself if i wanted to could make a 600k stack(obviously wouldn't as that attrition would be enormous even in my most depevoled providences there support limit is on just short of 100k)
 
In my Persian-Turkish wars some parts have Anatolia have seen 150k vs 100k battles, but the stacks themselves rarely breach the 40k mark.
 
The Late game Armies should have been more expensive, both to build and in upkeep. It should have been much harder to get manpower at those numbers. Why can't paradox fix the AI so it will care more about attrition? Even in CK2, which is their latest and most polished top selling game, the AI is killing itself because of Attrition.

Grubnessul said:
An additional idea might be that fortresses take up manpower as well to refill.
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This! :)
 
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I can see that lend itself to huge exploits: put army in enemy province, assault, stop short of conquering, repeat every 2 months. Then again, if not exploited I don't see much it would solve. Tiny bits of manpower drain everytime you take/retake/save a province?
 
th3freakie said:
I can see that lend itself to huge exploits: put army in enemy province, assault, stop short of conquering, repeat every 2 months. Then again, if not exploited I don't see much it would solve. Tiny bits of manpower drain everytime you take/retake/save a province?
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Surely that would deplete your own manpower much more than the enemies?
 
marty99 said:
Surely that would deplete your own manpower much more than the enemies?
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And maybe you can afford it. Point being that you'll deplete the enemy manpower without engaging their armies. Imagine the Persians depleting Mainland Portugal of manpower by repeatedly assaulting a fort in Goa.
 
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